


It's too cold outside...

by EmmyGreene



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Addiction, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel Wings, Beth Greene Lives, Beth Lives, Drug Use, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Minor Violence, Pointless, Protective Daryl Dixon, Rescue, Reunions, Sad, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 07:32:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13476702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmyGreene/pseuds/EmmyGreene
Summary: Beth spends her days in the window day dreaming waiting for the man with the wings to come and rescue her.A re-imagining of 8x02 'The Damned' inspired by Ed Sheeran's 'The A Team'. Kind of.





	1. Beth

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this part written for the longest time and I'm so happy I finally got it finished. 
> 
> I can't say this story came out quite how I wanted it to, but when do they ever?   
> I planned this as a one shot but I liked the idea of shifting the focalisation at different points in the story so I'm posting it as three chapters for clarity. 
> 
> ( and as always, not American so apologies if the language or speech slips a little... its hard to intentionally spell incorrectly!)

Beth can see her reflection in the glass of the windows but chooses to ignore it. Like most things these days, it’s easier not to accept the reality. Those white lips and pale face belong to someone else, someone skeletally thin and scarred, aged beyond their years. That isn’t her, it can’t be. It’s snowing outside but Beth doesn’t care, she needs to breathe in some fresh air so she pulls the glass across, letting the cold air fill the room. Her actions are met with groans from the others but she tunes them out. They’ve been nothing but background noise for a long time now, a chorus of cold and frightened women who have banded together but excluded her. She can’t remember why anymore. She breathes in the snowflakes, watches in awe as they fall to the ground. The only bit of beauty left in her world.

She’s not just looking at the snow though. This is her spot, year round. She sits in the window sill and waits. There is a man coming to rescue her. Nobody believes her, of course they don’t, but she knows it. She feels it in her bones. There is someone out there who loves her and he’s coming to find her. She perches here every day waiting, staring out over their compound into the vast fields. She’s had false alarms, so many men look the same these days but there’s one way she’ll know him for sure; his angel wings. He’s not like ordinary men and so he has been marked as something special. She’s drawn them over and over, from her memory. Scratched them into the window around the window, the frame of her bed, drawn them repeatedly on the walls and in a moment that alarmed the others, she carved them onto her thighs with broken glass. They screamed when they found her, assumed it was self harm but it wasn’t, she just needed a permanent reminder.

The room grows colder still and Beth shivers. She’s dressed only in black underwear and a loose cotton robe, not enough to keep her warm. She pulls the thin robe tight around herself and leans back against the frame. She thinks about how her hand fit in his, how warm his skin was against hers. He was always warm to touch. There was fire too. They were always around fire, campfires, cooking fires, a house fire even. Her lips form a faint smile at the thought. The girls have begun to complain loudly now so she works even harder to tune them out, staring at the falling snow, imagining the way it would cover those wings powdery white.

Finally Mara approaches her. She’s the only one that has any time for Beth, who cares for her in anyway. She’s carrying a red knit blanket which she places over Beth’s shoulders before she closes the window.

‘Daydreaming again?’ she asks quietly, perching herself in the window frame, opposite Beth.

Beth nods. She knows Mara means to be kind, but she likes to be left alone in the window. She likes to escape.

‘I think a storm’s coming’ Mara tries again, looking at the wind blowing the snowflakes around.

‘He’ll be here soon’ Beth replies.  She doesn’t speak out loud very often, she doesn’t feel the need. When she does her voice is barely more than a whisper and Mara struggles to hear her. This time though, it’s obvious. They all know Beth spends her days in the window waiting for him.

‘Not today Beth’ she says slowly ‘it’s too cold outside for angels to fly’.

‘He’ll find a way’.

Mara leaves it at that and joins Beth in staring out the window. She’d never admit it to the others but sometimes she likes to sit with Beth and believe in her stories. It’s a nice break from reality. Their lives here are repetitive at best and miserable at worst; and she likes the idea of a guardian angel arriving in the midst of it all and setting them all free. She’s asked Beth over and over who he is but she’s never had a straight answer. He doesn’t have a name or an age, Beth’s not sure how she knows him or if they were married or just friends. She can’t remember any details but she knows he is coming. That’s what she tells them anyway, or nowadays just Mara because the rest stopped listening once they realised she didn’t make sense. He’s real to Beth though, whoever he is and it’s the only thing she believes in. Her eyes are a steely gray most of the time, vacant almost but when she talks about him, she lights up. She’s told Mara stories about him feeding a baby, hunting deer, reading the Bible with her when nobody else would. She has so many little details in those moments that Mara knows they must have happened with someone and that inside Beth’s confused mind, it’s him.

Beth stays there until the sun dips below the horizon and she can’t see anything else. The stars are bright but not bright enough to light the ground below. She makes her way back over to her bed and curls up under the covers, turning to face the wall. She’s got a few hours to rest until _they_ arrive. All the girls try and sleep these final few hours, unless they’ve got something else to take their mind off things. About a year ago, a new man arrived. He’s larger than most, with a ridiculous mullet and he often stutters when he speaks to the women. Despite that, he seemed kind. He’s never once forced himself on any of them. This alone made him stand out. Their sole purpose in this wretched place was to please whichever men appeared, whoever _he_ deemed worthy. They asked him for help. He was some kind of scientist, that’s why he was here, a prisoner of sorts, just like them. They wanted a suicide pill which he wouldn’t produce but he created something else, to calm their nerves. One of the girls eventually figured out a way to modify it and smoke it to get high. And one by one they all gave in to temptation. That’s the problem with a wretched life; they were all looking for an escape.

Beth held on the longest, but eventually she too gave in; after the worst day of her life, something so terrible she couldn’t let herself think about it ever again.  He was gone now, the man with the mullet. They never did find out what happened to him, but then they seldom did. They weren’t precious like the wives, who always seemed to be in the know. They were the leftovers. And now they knew enough to get themselves high and nobody cared because it made them more compliant.

On her side Beth felt under her pillow for her pipe. He hadn’t come, again.

‘Daryl’ she murmured his name as she traced the wings on her thigh. That was her secret, his name. Every day that passed without his arrival broke her just a little more inside. Believing in him was the only thing she had left to do, the only hope she could hold onto.

She sat up and quickly lit a match before breathing in. She grimaced as she did then waited for it to kick in. The night would be long, it always was but at least she’d be far, far away from it now.

She passed all her days this way, waiting in the window for an angel to rescue her. She sat there waiting until winter began to end. The snow was melting away, the icicles gone from the roof although the wind still had a chill to it. She’d been here since she was eighteen, she had no idea how old she was now. She knew enough to always reply eighteen when asked. That made her appealing no matter how sunken her face looked, how pale her skin seemed. She was thinking about that- age and how hers compared to his. She didn’t know how old her was, or is now. It simply didn’t matter. It was just a number, she knew that now. The men came in and she stared at her wall, wishing she could remember his face. As then night wore on she lay in bed counting cracks on the roof, naming each one. Eventually she was on her own again,  she felt the space on the bed and rolled over into her pillows.

She slept too long and woke up to a panic, the girls desperately trying to convince her to run with them. Someone had arrived to unlock the back door, one they’d never seen used. She couldn’t move the, the world was spinning too fast around her and she was stuck in slow motion.

‘Fine, stay here and die then’ someone spat as they closed the door. Beth sat up from bed and noticed she was bathed in sweat. It had happened again. She tried to lie back down to wait it out but heard a bang, followed by another. Even in her haze she could recognize them as gunshots.


	2. Daryl

‘Beth!’   
It wasn’t so much excitement as disbelief. He’d been trying to move on from her for so long. Her memory had haunted him and right now, before him, she looked like a ghost. She was emaciated and her skin translucent, her blue eyes faded to gray and something else too… a look he’d seen so many times on the faces young girls who hung around his brother, girls desperate for their next hit.  
Time stood still around them and suddenly he was hyper aware of everything in that room. The lingering smell of sex and stained mattresses were what hit him first and immediately he pieced together exactly what this place was. He felt as though the breath was sucked out of him. Amidst the scrawled on walls and barred windows, the damp floor and heavy air, there was Beth; his Beth trembling in a thin white robe.   
‘Y, y, you came’ he voice was little more than a whisper.   
Tears flooded her eyes and her hands shook as she tried to wipe them away.  
Instinct told Daryl not to run at her, too approach slowly, cautiously.   
‘Have ya been here this while time?’ he mumbled.  
He didn’t want to believe the girl he’d gone crazy mourning had been under his nose these past few years. He didn’t want to believe she’d spent years being held like this.  
Confusion spread over her face ‘I, I d-don’t know’ she stammered.   
She took a breath and tried again ‘I’ve been waiting for you forever’.  
There was a hint of something in her voice he’d only heard once before, when he first met her and she wanted to end her life- hopelessness.   
Anger flooded through his veins. It was easier to be angry than sad and he was feeling too much of everything right now. He kicked the door in rage then turned to face her again.   
‘Yer cold?’ she nodded but didn’t move.  
He bent over and picked up a discarded red rug from the floor, then held it out to her, an offering.   
Outside he could hear the bullets flying, the sound was almost deafening, yet not loud enough to drown out the thoughts inside his mind.   
He could clearly head his father’s voice ‘Ya done fucked up this time son’.   
Followed by Merle ‘Well Darylina, yer the one who lost her, yer must’ve known she was dead or like this’.   
‘Stop it’ Daryl growled, not realising he’d spoken out loud until Beth paused, a few steps closer now, reaching for the blanket. He crossed the few steps left between them and gently placed the throw around her shoulders. She moved to pull it tighter and briefly their hands touched.   
That was all it took, she threw herself hopelessly into his arms.   
‘You came’ she repeated.   
It took him a moment to adjust to the feeling of her against him. She was ice cold and wobbly, her breathing off. Tentatively he tightened his arms, encircling her. He bowed his head and in doing so, smelled her scalp; the only thing unchanged. She smelled exactly like Beth, a scent he’d never forgetten and a hundred memories came flooding back.  
‘Beth’ he whispered he name then kissed the crown of her head. A single tear slid down his cheek as he too began to softly shake.   
‘I’m so sorry’ he said. The anger had faded now and he felt his legs turn to jelly. He was in shock, completely overcome with emotion. He stumbled and somehow they both wound up on the floor, him cradling her against his chest, both sobbing. He continued to apologise but his words were unintelligible now.   
‘You’re here’ she kept saying, over and over as she nestled herself against him, trying to focus only on the warmth of his body and not the sounds of bullets and screaming beyond the door.   
‘I told them you would find me, said you were gonna come for me and none of them believed me’ she whispered.   
‘By mistake, I didn’t know yer were ‘ere’ he replied, his speech slow enough to follow now. Another gunshot sounded, closer now and she startled.  
‘Please don’t leave me here’ she pleaded.   
‘Course not’ he replied.  
Up close she looked even worse. There were puckered scars and her face looked sunken, she’d aged too quickly. He placed another soft kiss on her head and held her tighter   
‘Yer comin’ home with us’.


	3. Rick

Finally the hallway fell silent. Dead bodies littered the path between where Rick was and the doorway he’d seen Daryl slip behind moments ago, once his ammunition ran out.  
Cautiously Rick headed towards it, reasonably confident there was nobody left in his way.  
He let out their whistle and waited. Silence hit so he tried again then head the shuffle of shoes. Just to his left he saw a man on the floor, holding a dagger.   
‘There’s women in there. Unarmed’ he said.   
‘Daryl, that right?’ Rick called, unsure if Daryl was even in there, hoping he was still alive if he was.  
There was no reply.   
Rick fired his gun one last time then walked over the body before approaching the door.   
He was surprised at the force it took to open it, a thick heavy door that someone had clearly shot the lock off.   
He crept inside then gasped, taking a moment to make sense of the scene before him.   
He’d seen ghosts before but wondered why hers chose to appear now, amidst all this. Was it a warning? A reminder of the humanity they’d lost?  
The scene was almost a perfect re-enactment of the last time he’d seen her. Just another bad day amongst so many, and they’d had to leave her behind. Her body was still warm when they’d left her in the back of an abandoned van. Just moments prior, Daryl held her on the ground, just as he was now, tears streaming down his face as they were now. Her blonde ponytail had dangled over Daryl’s arm, exactly as it did now and it sent shivers down Rick’s spine.   
Lori had always looked beautiful when she’d appeared to him, the picture of health. Beth looked like an animated corpse, he could see every bone in her face, she looked shrunken.  
‘Rick, it’s her’ Daryl spoke and suddenly Rick was afraid it was not one but two ghosts before him. He knew losing Beth affected Daryl more than they could ever realise, maybe she appeared to him right at the end. Rick felt a lump form in his throat and was almost unable to speak. Not Daryl, he couldn’t lose Daryl.  
‘She’s been here all this time’ Daryl sobbed, Beth’s head lolling around as he heaved.   
‘But we’ve found her now an’ she’s comin’ back with us’  
Rick took another step forward, slightly afraid as he reached out to touch Daryl. To his surprise he felt the warm flesh of him, he felt solid, real.   
He looked down at Beth, could she? Could that pale, shrunken imitation of Beth actually be the real thing? He dropped his hand down to her cheek. It was cold and tear stained but undeniably real.  
‘Beth’ he said her name as a sigh.   
She stared at him blankly, as though she couldn’t place him.   
‘It’s me, Rick’ he started again but got no better response. He looked up at Daryl who was staring at him, urgently.   
‘We gotta get her out of here, now’   
He helped Daryl and Beth to their feet.   
‘You alright to walk?’ Rick asked her, concerned.   
Before she could reply Daryl scooped her up. Once upon a time she was heavier than she looked, but not anymore. They headed down the same hallway, dodging bodies   
‘Just keep looking up’ Daryl whispered to Beth.   
Rick marched onward, looking for the quickest escape route. He backtracked to where he’d killed a man only a few minutes prior.   
‘Need to check for weapons’ he said walking into the room he’d fought to enter.   
He tried not to look at the body hanging from the wall, tried to ignore the smell of blood and shit and fear that pervaded the space. He retrieved the keys he’d shoved in his pocket earlier and fumbled until he found the right one to enter.  
For the second time in the hour, Rick was dumbstruck at the sight before him. It wasn’t a ghost this time but a baby; a beautiful baby sleeping in her crib. He felt bile rise to the back of his throat, suddenly his prior actions felt less valid, no wonder that man had fought to keep him away.   
‘We don’t kill babies’ Rick said out loud.   
‘What?’ Daryl entered the room finally.   
Rick bent down over the side and picked the baby up.   
‘Gracie’ he whispered to her. He was suddenly aware how babies were always the perfect weight, how sweet she smelled just like Judith had. There was something about holding a baby that overwhelmed you and he tried to focus on that for a moment. He knew he had to pull himself together if he was going to get them all out of here.   
‘I got ya’ he whispered to the little girl, ‘I got ya and we’re going to get you outta this place. Would you like that? Would you like a ride in the car?’   
Rick had heard the shuffling behind him when Daryl and Beth entered the room but hadn’t paid it any attention. Now Beth was at his side, gazing intently at the baby.  
‘How old do you think she is?’ she asked, her voice a broken whisper.   
Rick concentrated on the babies face for a moment ‘maybe eight months’.   
‘She’s….she’s mine, I think’ Beth was unable to speak. She tried gasping for air. Rick noticed her forehead was coated in a sheen of sweat and she was trembling. He tried to move the baby to his other arm so he could help her but Daryl was already there, his arm around her, holding her up.   
‘Breathe Beth, we need ya to breathe’ he told her.   
Her gasping continued a while until the baby began to cry and Rick jumped back into action.   
‘Downstairs, we’ll take that back stairwell, radio the others, we need to get them both out of here’ he barked at Daryl.   
They moved quickly, almost dangerously so. They survived another stand off in the car park and suddenly they were in the car. Rick looked to Daryl’s bike   
‘I’ll come back for it later, ‘m not leavin’ her’.   
Aaron stepped forward ‘I’ll ride it back’ he volunteered. Rick shook his head.  
‘I need you to ride with us. Need you to drive or hold the baby.’   
Aaron nodded and jumped behind the wheel.  
Holding tightly to Gracie Rick slid into the passenger seat then turned to the back. Beth was laying across the seat, her head resting in Daryl’s lap. He’d seen Daryl at his most vulnerable. He’d seen how sweet he could be with Judith, how caring he was to all of them but he’d never seen him like this. Beth’s body was shaking but somehow Daryl was too, he was clearly rattled and yet he was making soothing sounds, stroking her hair, whispering to her. Rick wondered if Daryl was even aware anyone else was in the car.   
In his arms the baby wriggled and cried again. He bounced her up and down, hoping to distract her.   
‘That’s Maggie’s sister’ he said to Aaron.   
‘Oh my god’   
Nobody spoke for a moment until Beth’s breathing finally evened out.   
‘They told me she died’ she breathed out.  
Rick turned to face her.  
‘You had a baby’   
Beth nodded. Her sweat soaked her was clinging to her now, the white of her nightgown turned transparent now damp. Rick could see her tiny frame and couldn’t believe she’d have been able to carry a baby only a few months ago.  
‘The night she was born, I passed out and they said the baby died’   
Daryl looked at him ‘that babies got them blue eyes I’ve only ever seen one place else’ he said.   
Rick nodded, lifting her in the air once again.   
He looked at Beth ‘we’re gonna get you looked at once we’re back home, you need ta rest. Do you mind if I take care of her tonight? Until you’re feeling better’   
Beth was crying still, but she nodded then buried her head under a blanket.  
‘She’s more ‘an jus’ sick’ Daryl spoke.  
‘She’s comin’ down off somethin’’   
Rick nodded. He knew, he’d picked it right away, he just didn’t know if Daryl could. He pulled the little girl back onto his lip and kissed her fuzzy head.   
‘We’re all going to look after you while we get your Momma good and healthy. She’s one of us and so are you. We’re family’ he whispered.   
He looked around the car again and took them all in- Aaron, grief-stricken but soldiering on for now. Rick knew that wouldn’t last, that he’d fall apart once they reached Alexandria. Daryl in the back, who’d returned to them colder and harder than ever but had melted once again with Beth in his arms, Beth who they knew he’d felt responsible for but never realised just how deep those feelings ran. Rick could never have understood it if he hadn’t seen Daryl today, the change to instant. His eyes focused again on Beth, small and frail and in desperate need of their help and yet. Who knew how she’d changed and here on his lap, a baby, maybe her baby and even if she wasn’t, well she was clearly going to be. A baby always brought hope and promise of a better tomorrow. He felt sure of himself once again. This is why they continued to fight; this is why they needed to win. She’d get healthy and he’d watch them fall in love- or maybe they already were and he’d watch them move forward together, a baby in tow. Aaron would grieve and then heal and they’d all be there for him. This baby was going to grow up healthy and strong and safe. He’d make sure of it. The day had taken its toll but Rick felt a fire burning and his heart began to race. He didn’t want to sit in a car full or broken people ever again, they would fight harder, stronger. They would win. There might not be a happy ending yet but there would be, he was sure of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this somewhat somber little fic.   
> Comments are love :)


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